In 1987 I enjoyed the pleasure of meeting
Henry Barnes at the Waldorf school in Austin. I drove up there
from Houston, where I was living at that time, to hear a lecture
by Barnes, who was president of the Anthroposophical Society
in America, and to exchange a few words with him. He was a very
congenial, white-haired gentleman in his seventies.

It surprised me to see that Henry Barnes had
just published a new book, because he must be way into his eighties.
(Actually, as can be easily calculated from the text below, he
was born in 1912.) Nevertheless, in 1997, Anthroposophic Press
published "A Life for the Spirit - Rudolf Steiner in the
Crosscurrents of Our Time" by Henry Barnes. His authbiographical
sketch in the introduction is relevant to the WC list, because
here we have an eyewitness account of the Waldorf schools in
Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. I understand that Dan
Dugan is collecting various memorabilia from the time and place
in question in order to feed his pet theory that Anthroposophy
is infested with Nazi ideology, and that people like myself are,
ipso facto, Nazis - consciously or unconsciously. And Henry Barnes
too, of course.

In his introduction to "A Life for the
Spirit," Henry Barnes writes:

"I met the work of
Rudolf Steiner in the summer of 1933, just before my twenty-first
birthday. The occasion was the first conference to be held in
North America to present anthroposophy and some of the practical
initiatives arising from it.

"Just a year and a
half before, in January 1932, the suicide of my roommate and
dearest friend had struck like lightning into the protected and
unquestioning confidence of my young life. Peter and I had been
schoolmates for many years at the Lincoln School of Teachers
College in New York City, and we had gone on together to Harvard
College. The Lincoln School pioneered what came to be known as
"progressive education" in the United States. The school
had been established in 1917, and we entered the first grade
the following year. It was a privilege to attend this truly outstanding
school, yet Peter's death raised deeply troubling questions.
Had our education in some way failed us? I was roused to begin
a search for an education that could go beyond the intellect
and reach deeper than self-expression. Destiny intervened.

"Peter's mother, in
her effort to understand a death that had so little apparent
outer cause, remembered a book she had read before Peter was
born. It was by Rudolf Steiner and was entitled *Knowledge of
the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment*. After Peter's death, she
returned to the book and discovered that Rudolf Steiner had written
other books, and that there was even a small group of people
in New York City who knew of his work. She also learned that
a school based on his work had been started there a few years
before. It was Peter's mother who invited me to the conference
in Spring Valley, New York, in July 1933.

"Two of the three
guest speakers at that conference were teachers at the school
in Stuttgart, Germany, which Rudolf Steiner had founded in 1919.
What they said about the school, and about the view of the human
being on which it was based, stirred me deeply. I determined
to go to Stuttgart - one way or another - but I had already committed
myself to a teaching job for the fall, a position I considered
myself fortunate to have obtained during those Depression years.
My even greater good fortune, however, was that when I told the
school's headmaster that I wanted to leave at the end of the
first year to study this new "Waldorf" education, he
smiled wisely and said, "Why don't you go now and get it
out of your system? Then come back to Choate."

"As a result, I arrived
in Stuttgart eight months after Hitler had been elected chancellor
of Germany on January 30, 1933. As a student in the Waldorf Teacher
Training Course, I came to realize that the Nazi government was
gradually tightening a noose in the hope that the school would
sooner or later close on its own. The Jewish teachers had to
leave, and there was to be no new first grade. Every lesson had
to begin with a "Heil Hitler" salute, and parents got
into trouble if their children were not enrolled in a Hitler
Youth Group. The school, however, did not give in. Finally, in
March, 1938, the school was forced to close by government order.
It was publicly stated that the function of education was to
prepare the coming generation to be citizens of the state. There
was no room in Germany for a school whose goal was to educate
children to think for themselves as adults. It is significant
also that the Anthroposophical Society and the Christian Community
- an independent movement for religious renewal, inaugurated
with Rudolf Steiner's help - had been banned earlier by the Nazi
government in 1935. Hitler knew that a free spiritual life is
by far the greater danger to totalitarian state control.

"By 1938 I was a class
teacher in the first Waldorf, or "Rudolf Steiner,"
school in England, the New School, later called Michael Hall.
That September I witnessed the British public's almost hysterical
relief when Neville Chamberlain stepped out of the plane from
Munich and announced "Peace in our time!" Staid, self-contained
Londoners danced in the streets. Twelve months later, World War
Two began.

"These external world
events and their consequences affected human beings worldwide
and grought unimaginable suffering to millions. My own life continued
to unfold in dramatic interplay with the larger circumstances
of world affairs.

"Two days after the
war began, Christy MacKaye and I were married in Dornach, Switzerland,
and we spent the first year of the war in that country. On June
1, 1940, Christy and I - with her father Percy MacKaye (her mother
had died in St. Germain-en-Laye near Paris, June 1, 1939), her
sister Arvia, brother Robin, and my younger brother Alfred -
sailed from Genoa with the last American ship to leave the Mediterranean.
We landed in New York on June 10, the day Italy declared war."

To sum it up in a nutshell: This is how Henry
Barnes explains how he was drawn to a Waldorf Nazi meeting in
America, hypnotized into the cult by stealth and shrewdness -
"What they said
about the school, and about the view of the human being on which
it was based, stirred me deeply"
- and went to Stuttgart to salute Hitler in the Waldorf fashion.